Max Horkheimer Quotes on Knowledge
Max Horkheimer's 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory inaugurated the Frankfurt School's distinctive program of critical theory, distinguishing the disinterested third-person investigation of social facts characteristic of traditional theory from the reflexive critical theory that includes the historical conditions of its own production within its analysis. The 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, written jointly with Adorno during their wartime exile in California, develops the more sweeping thesis that Enlightenment reason has dialectically reverted into a new form of myth — the dominating instrumental rationality of advanced industrial civilization — and the late Eclipse of Reason (1947) extends the analysis to the contemporary American scene. The framework supplied the philosophical vocabulary the next generations of the Frankfurt School (Habermas, Honneth) would inherit and revise.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”
-
Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“Reason for centuries has meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men.”
-
“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own.”
pp. 21-22. -
Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“Logic is not independent of content.”
-
Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“The function of critical theory is to facilitate the historical process by which mankind becomes conscious of itself.”
-
“At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which … offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.”
p. 133. -
“Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.”
p. 133. -
“Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.”
p. 146. -
“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .”
p. 148. -
“In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21.